Rick Gunn/Nevada Appeal Carson City resident Ron Kendall sits at one of the simulated driving stations at the computer lab at WNCC. Kendall has been inspired to help create better drivers by spreading the news about the effectiveness of the driving simulators.
"It's kind of strange the way this worked out," he laughed.
Kendall went into the hospital in July 2000 for one-day sinus surgery, a procedure doctors had previously performed with success. When he was released, doctors failed to notice his salt levels were low and four days later, he went into a seizure at his home.
He was in three hospitals over a six-week period for treatment of the seizure and given more than 50 drugs while there. When he was released, his memories were fuzzy.
"My mind was zero," the 66-year-old said. "I didn't know my own family."
He got back out on the road, but not without taking a driver's education course with his wife, Jan, who had been in a recent accident at a four-way stop, no fault of her own.
"I thought the only way I'm going to do this was report the seizure to the DMV and take a behind-the-wheel driving course."
He and Jan signed up for driver's education in Reno. He soon found that the driver's training course failed to expose him to threatening conditions, the way a pilot might be exposed to various situations while using a flying simulator.
He thought often of a friend of his, a pilot, receiving simulator training for the Boeing 777, which has been in development for the past five years.
"Why on God's green earth can't we come up with the same thing for drivers?" Kendall asked.
He began working to find a driving simulator, all along questioning whether it would be taken seriously by students, who might see it as a video game.
In the summer of 2003, Kendall located a research and development company in Hawthorne, Calif., called Systems Technology, Inc., which studies the operations of ground and aerospace vehicles and the people using them. Its driving simulator was in use in five California schools and by the Tucson Police Department.
Kendall talked its president, Wade Allen, into visiting Carson City to give a presentation.
"I think it's mainly through people like Ron, people who are interested in what's going on around them, that something like this is brought to a local area," Allen said.
Western Nevada Community College President Carol Lucey arranged for the presentation to be given at the college. Representatives from the Carson City School District, the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles, the Carson City Sheriff's Department, the Nevada Employee Insurance Pool and others came.
After seeing the demonstration, the Nevada Employee Insurance Pool gave $24,000 to bring the software to WNCC. Late last year, it was installed on 24 computers in a lab at WNCC, which also began offering driver's education courses.
In the simulator, students use a steering wheel, blinkers, accelerator and brakes to make turns and to avoid pedestrians, cars and animals that come into their paths.
The simulator is capable of turning 90 degrees in either directions so students can check what is beside them. A rearview mirror shows what is behind them.
"It actually gives you a little printout, showing how many pedestrians you hit, how many accidents you were in and how many times you went over the speed limit," said Judy Larquier, who coordinates the driver's education program for the Business and Industry Department at WNCC. "What I tell parents who call is that this gives students the practice before they get out on the road."
Kendall is a computer programmer, who retired from the Marine Corps in 1975. He worked for the University of Nevada in their accounting department and recently became certified in the American Association of Retired Persons program 55 Alive.
He hopes the DMV will institute a tracking system to see which drivers have taken what type of training and if simulators prove worthwhile.
"I'm not religious, but I believe Ron was saved from the seizure to do the driver simulators," his wife said. "It's his top goal. He makes it his number one priority."